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activist Diplomat reformer socialite
Harriman was born on July 21, 1870 in New York City. She was the daughter of Francis W. J. Hurst, a merchant, and Caroline Elise Jaffray, who died in 1873.
Known throughout her life as Daisy, she was raised largely by her grandfather, Edward Jaffray, whose friends included many influential men on both sides of the Atlantic.
Harriman had what she called a "sketchy" education under Mrs. Lockwood, first in the J. P. Morgan mansion and then at Lockwood's Collegiate School for Girls, but she traveled widely.
For many years Harriman led the life of a young society matron interested in charitable and civic activities. With Elisabeth Marbury, Anne Morgan, and others, she was a founder of the Colony Club (the first women’s social club in New York), serving from 1903 to 1916 as its first president.
She established and chaired the Women's National Wilson and Marshall Association, which became the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. Her energetic efforts gave the cause of woman's suffrage far more visibility in the campaign of 1912 than the candidate's tepid support justified. Wilson appointed Harriman to the Federal Industrial Relations Commission, which was chaired by her close friend Frank P. Walsh. She played a central role in organizing the arbitration that averted a nationwide railroad strike in 1913.
She was also a leader in the National Civic Federation, the Consumers’ League, and other organizations and served until 1918 on the board of managers of the New York reformatory for women at Bedford. As a result of her campaigning for Woodrow Wilson in 1912, she was the sole woman member of the Federal Industrial Relations Commission during 1913-1916. Following the death of her husband in 1914, she moved to Washington, where she became an influential political hostess.
When the United States entered World War I, Samuel Gompers named her the head of the Committee of Women in Industry of the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense. She was in Europe three times during the war, once to inspect industrial conditions and twice as commander of the Red Cross Motor Corps. She was assistant director of transportation in France in 1918 and a delegate to the Inter-Allied Women's Council in Paris during the peace conference. Eager to keep a Wilsonian in the White House, Harriman supported William G. McAdoo's several bids for the presidency, starting in 1920.
During World War I Harriman served with the Red Cross Motor Corps and was appointed by President Wilson chairman of the Committee on Women in Industry of the Council of National Defense. During the Republican administrations from 1921 to 1932, her Washington home was a bastion of Democratic society. In 1923 she published a lively memoir, From Pinafores to Politics.
As president of the Woman's National Democratic Club and as the Democratic national committeewoman for the District of Columbia (1924-1936), Harriman participated in every presidential campaign, although she was strictly nonpartisan in New York City's municipal elections. Backing Newton D. Baker in 1932, she remained neutral during the Democratic National Convention that year, and so she was not a member of the New Deal's inner circle.
Yet, she was at the hub of Franklin Roosevelt's administration, sharing her estate in Washington with Frances Perkins in 1933. Roosevelt named her minister to Norway in April 1937. With the return of a Democratic administration under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she again found herself near the centre of power, and in June 1937 Roosevelt appointed her U. S. minister to Norway. She was the second American woman, after Ruth Bryan Rohde, to hold ministerial rank.
After the outbreak of World War II, Harriman dealt with the problems of evacuating U. S. nationals from Norway and protecting U. S. rights. In November 1939 she succeeded in obtaining the release and return to American hands of the freighter City of Flint, which had been captured on the high seas by the German warship Deutschland and had been taken into a neutral Norwegian port. During World War II, hers was the first official report of the German invasion of Norway. With the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, she was forced to flee Oslo. She made her way to Sweden, where she arranged for the safety of other Americans and of members of the Norwegian royal family, returning with them to the United States in August. She spent several harrowing days under German fire, following the government in its flight from Oslo before she found refuge in Sweden. Unable to rejoin the Norwegian government as it escaped to London, she supervised the evacuation of more than 800 refugees, including the crown princess of Norway and her children, to the United States. With them, she sailed from Petsamo, Finland, in August 1940. Next, she joined Roosevelt's reelection campaign and then served as vice-chairperson of the White Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which led the anti-isolationist crusade between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor. In 1941 she published a record of her service in Norway, Mission to the North.
Harriman died at her home in Georgetown, Washington, on August 31, 1967.
Florence Jaffray Harriman is remembered as a prominent socialite, suffragist, social reformer, diplomat and activist. She worked on campaigns on women's rights and child labor and, as minister to Norway in World War II, organized evacuation efforts while hiding in a forest from the Nazi invasion. After World War II she continued to actively support civic reform and wrote several books about the war. In 1942 she received the highest honor of Norway, the Great Cross of St. Olav. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy awarded her the first Citation for Distinguished Service.
Named as manager of the state's Reformatory for Women at Bedford, Harriman was regularly reappointed until 1916. A devoted friend of progressive mayor John Purroy Mitchel, she adopted reform witha vengeance. An antisuffrage rally turned her from a passive to an active supporter of the vote for women, but she never approved of the militancy of what she called "the sex-conscious bloc. " Harriman was an enthusiastic supporter of Woodrow Wilson's presidential aspirations from the time she first met him in Bermuda, although he dismissed her at first as a "fine, uninteresting person. "
While sympathetic to the workers' cause and a friend of the labor leaders John Mitchell and "Mother" Jones, she insisted on a balanced view and ultimately dissented from Walsh's strongly prounion final report.
Her outspoken advocacy of woman's suffrage and perhaps her attempt in 1915 to persuade the president, through Colonel Edward M. House, to support counterrevolution in Mexico, had convinced Wilson that she was "a most difficult woman to handle. " Harriman then turned to the campaign for American preparadeness and to work for Allied relief.
During the Republican decade, she began a tradition of Sunday-night dinners at her Washington home. Originally limited to progressive Democrats, by the mid-1920s these were nonpartisan gatherings of influential citizens at which stimulating conversation, scrupulously unreported by attending journalists, was the order of the day.
Harriman was an avid supporter of postwar international organization, and after 1945, of world disarmament. She also campaigned vigorously for home rule for the District of Columbia.
Quotations: Harriman often found herself in the middle of historic events. As she stated, "I think nobody can deny that I have always had through sheer luck a box seat at the America of my times. "
Harriman was renowned for her wit, her hospitality, and the erect bearing that her father, a former army officer, had trained her to maintain.
Quotes from others about the person
The citation which was awarded by Kennedy read "In her illustrious career in public service, Mrs Harriman has made singular and lasting contributions to the cause of peace and freedom. .In all of her endeavors, Mrs. Harriman has exemplified the spirit of selflessness, courage and service to the Nation, reflecting the highest credit on herself and this country. She has indeed, earned the esteem and admiration of her countrymen and the enduring gratitude of this Republic. "
Harriman married J. Borden Harriman, a banker, on November 18, 1889. They had one child, Ethel M. B. Harriman, born on December 11, 1897. She later became an actress working in Hollywood, California.
Harriman, her husband and daughter found themselves in the middle of Europe as World War I erupted in the summer of 1914. Hoping that the healing waters in the Bohemian spa in Karlsbad would benefit her husband, Harriman brought her family to Europe in June 1914.
Her husband's health continued to deteriorate, and he died on December 1, 1914. His prolonged illness, the resulting lack of income, and the expense of maintaining several homes had consumed nearly all of his net worth. Harriman never remarried.
Her daughter died on July 4, 1953, at the age of 55.
